Personal computer systems are well known in the art. They have attained widespread use for providing computer power to many segments of today's modern society. Personal computers (PCs) may be defined as a desktop, floor standing, or portable microcomputer that includes a system unit having a central processing unit (CPU) and associated volatile and non-volatile memory, including random access memory (RAM) and basic input/output system read only memory (BIOS ROM), a system monitor, a keyboard, one or more flexible diskette drives, a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive, a fixed disk storage drive (also known as a “hard drive”), a pointing device such as a mouse, and an optional network interface adapter. One of the distinguishing characteristics of these systems is the use of a motherboard or system planar to electrically connect these components together. The use of mobile computing devices, such as notebook PCs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), sophisticated wireless phones, etc., has also become widespread. Mobile computing devices typically exchange some functionality or performance when compared to traditional PCs in exchange for smaller size, portable power, and mobility.
The widespread use of PCs and mobile computing devices in various segments of society has resulted in a reliance on computer systems both at work and at home, such as for telecommuting, news, stock market information and trading, banking, shopping, shipping, communication in the form of hypertext transfer protocol (http) and e-mail, as well as other services. Many of these functions take advantage of the communication abilities offered by the Internet or other networks, such as local area networks. One function that continues to grow in importance is e-mail (also known as electronic mail) as more and more users utilize e-mail for many, if not most, of their communications. Typically, a user sends and receives e-mail via an e-mail client that itself communicates with one or more mail servers to facilitate communication with other users over a local area network (LAN) or the Internet. Many of these users can receive hundreds of e-mails per day, making efficient management of the e-mails increasingly important. This problem can be exacerbated in a corporate environment as the rapidly increasing use of e-mail results in an increasing strain on corporate network, storage, or other computing resources.
To facilitate management of e-mails, many e-mail clients allow users to specify delivery options for a particular e-mail message. A user, for example, may specify a message as high priority to indicate to recipients that particular attention should be paid to the e-mail message. Similarly, a user may specify another e-mail message as low priority so that recipients may avoid reviewing the message until a more convenient time, which assists the recipients in managing their workload effectively. Other delivery options may include the addition of digital signatures, digitally signed e-mails, attachment of a file, return receipt requests, or other options. While many of these options are useful to users, they also increase can network traffic and increase the burden of system resources. If a user, for example, attaches a file to an e-mail message, that file must be transmitted to each recipient and potentially stored on each of their systems. The different delivery options thus result in increased use of system resources in spite of their usability benefits to e-mail client users. Users could solve this problem by refraining from using the delivery options in some situations, but this solution results in those users losing the efficiency benefits resulting from the delivery options. Users sending an attachment can also reduce the impact on the network by compressing files before transmittal, but such compression can waste time for the user as well as increasing the possibility of incompatibilities or compression errors.